Welcome to the Tricki

Welcome to the Tricki – a Wiki-style site that is intended to develop into a large store of useful mathematical problem-solving techniques. Some of these techniques will be very general, while others will concern particular subareas of mathematics. All of them will be techniques that are used regularly by mathematical problem-solvers, at every level of experience. We hope you will enjoy using the site and that many people will contribute to it. If you are new to the Tricki, then we have a page with information on it about what the Tricki is, what its aims are, what we hope it will develop into, how to read, write, find, edit, or comment on articles, and more:

If you want to go straight to the articles, then you have several options. The best way to understand what these options are is to explore the following links. Clicking on the words "Quick description" will give you some information about what to expect from these links.

What kind of problem am I trying to solve? Quick description ( A list of links, each to a page about some general category of problem, such as "proving equality", or "classification" (which will itself consist mostly of links to articles lower in the Tricki hierarchy). )

Subject-area front pages Quick description ( A list of links, each to a page about some area or subarea of mathematics. Although we are primarily interested in classifying articles by the type of problem they solve, it is in many cases natural to begin by restricting attention to the area they belong to. It is also desirable to have different ways of classifying articles, to maximize the chances that they can be found when written. )

General problem-solving tips Quick description ( A list of articles that give advice that can in principle apply to any mathematical problem. )

How to use mathematical concepts and statements Quick description ( You have heard of a definition or theorem, you know it is important because people say so, you know that people use it to solve problems, but to you it is a bit of a mystery how they use it to solve problems. If that is your situation, then this page is designed to help.)

There are other ways of finding articles. For more information, click on "Navigate" in the toolbar.

Regular maintenance: you may find that the Tricki is down for maintenance for up to an hour every Friday at 09:00 London time (GMT+0100).